Measuring Adulthood – A Meta-Analysis of the Markers of Adulthood Scale
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Adulthood is traditionally inferred from the socio-demographic milestones of marriage, parenthood, and having a stable, long-term career. Yet today these milestones are often delayed or unattainable for young people. We conducted a meta-analysis of studies using the Markers of Adulthood scale across the past three decades to assess (a) endorsement rates (%) of marriage, parenthood, and career as markers of adulthood, and (b) whether people think they have reached adulthood. Across 39 samples ( N = 17,465), marriage and parenthood were endorsed by a quarter of participants, whereas career was endorsed by 57%, suggesting that in today’s society career defines adult status more than marriage and parenthood. Furthermore, half of emerging adults (aged 18–29 years) considered themselves to have reached adulthood despite traditional milestones of adulthood occurring less frequently and later in life than ever before. Our findings have three main implications for measuring adult status including (1) deemphasise on the socio-demographic milestones of marriage and parenthood; (2) include wider age ranges in research; and (3) explore cultural differences. Reducing the focus on socio-demographic milestones and including more diverse samples will improve our understanding of adulthood and advance adults’ identity development.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it